Is the Lord among Us or Not?

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Exodus 17:1-7

I have often wondered why the LORD took the Israelites out wandering forty years through the wilderness of Sinai after delivering them from slavery in Egypt.  If I were God I would have turned north and headed up by the Mediterranean Sea and taken the King’s Highway.  The trip would have lasted only a couple of months and there would have been plenty of food and water.  But hey, God is God.  God is who God is and he does what God does.  But God is not arbitrary, nothing is ever purposeless on a whim with God.  He had a reason for taking them into the barren wilderness where there were harsh limitations on things needed for life.  It was, I believe, to teach them faith by providing for them in the most extreme of circumstances.

So, God took the Israelites through the wilderness to teach them faith.  This is a hard one I think for us to grasp.  You see, we are not accustomed to saying that God brings hard times upon us, that God causes or lets suffering happen to us and the reason being so that we can come to know God better and grow in faith.  We find it very difficult to say that God brings suffering to his people, his beloved daughters and sons, that they might come closer to him.  We like to say that bad things happen because this is a messed up world and things just happen or because we brought them upon ourselves and that God will somehow work these travesties out because he loves us.  Rarely, if ever will anyone say, “The LORD has brought me out into the wilderness.  The LORD is doing this to me.”  

But, you know, if we are going to be truly biblical about things; if we are disciples of Jesus born from above in him by the free gift of the Holy Spirit so that we are God’s beloved children as he is; if that is who we are, we are going to spend some time in the wilderness and it’s going to happen because God is going to take us there to go through stuff that seems tailer made to push all our buttons so to speak.  God will indeed lead us into the wilderness, into the valley of the shadow of death where our souls are ripped to pieces rather than take us where he makes us to lie down in green pastures beside the still waters so that our souls are restored. He will lead us to painful places where we are forced to ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?”  In a world so utterly broken and corrupted by sin, the LORD must bring us to places where in the depths of despair, of grief, of poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of boredom our only resort is to turn to the LORD and ask, “Are you here?”…and we find that God is.

In the wilderness we float.  We wander.  We wait.  We cannot help but ask “How am I going to survive out here?”   By nature we, like the Israelites, will complain.  We will want to turn back to the way life was before instead of moving forward.  We will doubt the LORD’s motive of love.  We will take matters into our own hands and serve and worship things that we believe will make us feel better.  We will try to bargain with the LORD.  We will say “Lord, get me out of the wilderness and I’ll do my best to be a better, more faithful person.”  But God’s got bigger plans for us than just wanting to get us to behave a little better.  The grace behind the wilderness is that it is not punishment.  It is the only healing way for us to move forward as disciples of Jesus and the new life he has for us. 

To endure the wilderness we must keep asking the questions “Who are you Lord and why have you brought me here?”  This entails that we must keep coming before the LORD in prayer.  We don’t come asking for what I perceive I need for things to be better.  You see, the LORD brings us into the wilderness to strip us down and show us who we really are.  So, it is important while we are in the wilderness to pay attention to what we are feeling because, chances are, we have felt these painful feelings before and buried them over and over again but now the LORD is bringing them forth from the tomb to heal us.  

There are things we can do in the wilderness to aid in our growth in Christ. We should feel free to rant at the LORD.  We are taught not to be angry and complain to God.  But, God’s a big boy.  He can handle it.  Rant, for sooner or later God very cleverly turns our rants back on us and reveals to us the truth about ourselves.   

Once I was in a wilderness and I got on a rant with God.  I was complaining that I always seemed to be the one to make painful sacrifices so that other people can be happy.  He turned that one around on me one day when he told me, “That’s exactly what I do for you.”  I shut up about that and realized it’s part of what real love is.

When you’re in the wilderness read the Bible listening for something to stick out to you and then spend the day or days pondering it.  Keep a journal of those things so that you can see the patterns that arise in what you hear so you can discern what is actually from the LORD and what are the things you want to hear.  

The wilderness is also a good place to draw together with our brothers and sisters in Christ to worship, to share, to pray and to study.  It is by the love of our brothers and sisters that we are built up in Christ and equipped and nourished in Christ.  The thing to note about the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites was that they all went through it together.  There were no Lone Ranger sufferers.  This is the single most significant strength of the small congregation.  If one of us suffers we all feel it.  This fellowship and support is what the church is all about.

Fellowship in the LORD is what our congregations have to offer particularly now post-Covid.  We don’t have the resources here to meet every perceived need that comes through the door.  But what we do have is a home and a family to offer those who come asking who is God and why has he brought me to the place that am at in life.  Well, God is the mystery of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  He dwells richly among us and he calls people here to meet him.  Those who come looking for the Lord, will find him and be well fed for the Lord is among us.  And, that question about why God has brought us out into the wilderness where we feel so lost is a trickier one to answer, but it usually has a lot to do with meeting him so you can find yourself and find that you’re not alone.  Amen.

Symbols of God's Faithfulness

 Exodus 17:1-7

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Please take a moment to reflect.  I want you to think about the life threatening experience that God has commanded you into….Well, that didn’t take long.  I would venture a guess that most of us would never imagine God intentionally putting us in situation where our lives were in danger.  Aside from missionaries, war veterans, and first responders who often have a sense that God called them to risk their lives for others, we are more apt to say those life-threatening times just happened and God got us through them; or, it was my own stupidity that got me into it but God got me out of it. We are very uncomfortable with the thought of God putting our lives at risk.  We tend to confess, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with,” not “Yea, God sent me to walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

But, if we take a moment to ponder the obvious here in our reading, that’s exactly what God did with his people.  At God’s command they left the Wilderness of Sin and camped at Rephidim where there was no water.  Let me show you a picture.  This is not a picture of the planet Mars.  It is of the likely location of Rephidim.  Rephidim is about a day’s journey to where they were headed, the place that the locals today call Jebul Musa, or the Mountain of Moses, which is the best candidate for Mt. Sinai.  It’s pretty bleak in the Region of Rephidim.  There’s no water there anywhere.  Just to let you know how the story is going to end, here’s a picture of a rock that is along the way from Rephidim to Sinai in the Wilderness of Horeb.  Horeb means “dry place”.  And wouldn’t you know it, the ground around this rock looks like water flowed there at one time.

Anyway, God sent his people to Rephidim where there was no water.  It is likely that this journey took place during May or June when the temperature there can average between 35-40degreesC (95-104degreesF).  The people of God were walking all day in those temperatures carrying loads of stuff and they came to camp at Rephidim where there was now water.  Medical science tells us that two days is the life expectancy of a person in that situation.  If it were especially hot (45C or 110F or higher) cut that expectancy in half.  

God had put their lives at risk, it would seem.  Israelites were one day away or less from dying for lack of water.  They were at the end of a long, hot day of trekking.  They were dangerously thirsty with no hope for water anytime soon. 

Have you ever been that thirsty?  I’ve had a couple of times once on a hike and once on a run in very hot temperatures with no water and gotten to the point of not being able to do anything more than stagger about a bit confused.  Never have I been a day away from death by dehydration.  But, if I were to imagine what it would have been like to be the Israelites that day, well, the feeling of thirst must have been excruciating; dry mouth, sore throat.  And, they weren’t able to get out of the heat and instead were loaded down and trekking on in it.  Your insides feel like a swarm of bees.  Your thought processes go all haywire.  No wonder the Israelites were complaining.  It really would appear that Moses had led them out into the wilderness to die; even turning back to where they last got water was too far.

They bring their complaint to Moses.  Yet, it’s really God they are after, but they don’t know how to get to God except by yelling at Moses.  (And, I can relate to Moses here.  It often happens that people take their grievances against God out on ministers.)  We’ve been taught to not get angry at God or at least don’t show anger at God.  But we do get angry with God because sometimes, or actually quite often. it just seems that God isn’t there and you never know what a day may bring and some days really bring a load of manure.  So, the Israelites really quite rudely/sternly make the demand for Moses to give them water to drink.  “Work a miracle Moses.  You’ve been doing it all along.”  

Because of the immediacy of this life-threatening crisis that appears to have no earthly solution, the Israelites are at the point of wondering whether the LORD was really in their midst or not. I’m sure each of us has felt that desperation at our most difficult times and wondered, “Is God really with me?”    The Israelites are so out of sorts with thirst, they are so overwhelmed with life and death reality they were in, that they couldn’t see the obvious anymore; that God had been with them to save them all along and things weren’t any different now in Rephidim just because there was no wonder.  

Just to refresh our memory, they had seen God plague Egypt. Their firstborn lived while the firstborn of Egypt died.  The Egyptians even gave them gold as they left Egypt and in that way, the Bible says, they plundered Egypt.  A pillar of cloud led them by day and a pillar of fire watched over them by night.  When Pharaoh pursued them, the pillar moved in behind them to be between them and Pharaoh’s army. God parted the Red Sea for them to cross on dry ground and then collapsed it back on Pharaoh’s army.  They had even been thirsty once before at the beginning of their wilderness trek.  They needed water at the very beginning and the only source they found was brackish.  But, God had Moses throw a piece of wood into it to make it drinkable and sweet.  Then God led them to an oasis.  They needed food and so God provided them daily with quail and manna.  God was certainly there with them.  That was obvious, but in this moment of being scared and hopelessly overwhelmed with physical thirst, they needed God to provide water…right now.  

As I said they went to Moses, not God, and demanded water, but even Moses seems at a loss.  Moses does what every great church leader does when threatened by the minions (and I’m being sarcastic here).  He places the blame somewhere else and threatens that God will get them for their complaining against the leadership.  He says, ”Why do you quarrel with me?  Why do you test the LORD?”  That’s like saying, “Don’t blame me.  I’ve just been doing what God’s told me to do.  Y’all are testing God, folks.  You are just trying to get God to do what you want him to do.  Is God now at your beck and call?  God’s provided before and will do so again.  Just show some patience.  Don’t be churlish children or God will strike you dead for testing him, because that’s the way god’s are, you know?”

The people continue to murmur against Moses.  I think maybe they think Moses has somehow screwed up or taken a wrong turn or something.  Murmuring is low-level background noise.  The background noise ringing in Moses ears was. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt to kill us, our children, and our livestock with thirst.”  He can’t get away from it and he’s thirsty too.

Feeling a little threatened by the people and perhaps a little hung out to dry by God, Moses cries out to God, “What shall I do with this people?  They’re ready to stone me.”  You know, riots happen when people have had enough.  Just saying. Moses is thinking like a minister in crisis here; thinking that the problem was his to solve and not God’s. “What shall I do?” he asks.  

Well, God answers.  God tells Moses, “Go get ‘the staff’ – ‘THE STAFF’ - the staff that you struck the Nile with and turned it to blood.  Get some of the elders.  Walk up through the midst of the people and get in front of them and go to the rock at Horeb” (which means “dry place”).  “You will see me standing there.  Strike the rock and water will gush forth and the people can drink.”  

We just have to take a moment and appreciate the symbolic value of what’s happened there.  Remember how President Trump did a perverted version of this when he had his security forces use tear gas and rubber bullets to clear a path through a peaceful protest so that he could parade with a general or two and some key white House people from the White House to St. John’s Church to hold up a Bible for a photo op.  He wanted to say, “I am law and order and God is on my side.”  That was so wrong.  But here, God is getting Moses to make a very symbolic walk through the people with a very powerful symbol of God’s faithfulness - The Staff.

Imagine being in the crowd in Rephidim.  It’s hot.  You are overwhelmed with thirst.  Your feet hurt.  Your back hurts.  Children are crying.  You’ve been murmuring mad and Moses, your trusted leader, is your identified target. You’re wondering where God is in all this. You’re afraid you’re going to die.  In fact, you feel like you’re dying and this is the greatest sense of futility you have ever felt.  Then, like the Red Sea parting, the crowd starts to part and make way for a group of some of the elders and in the middle of them is Moses carrying “The Staff”.  You see that staff; the staff that Moses used to conjure up plagues against Egypt and make a mockery of Egypt’s gods, the staff that Moses raised to part the Red Sea and lowered to drown Pharaoh’s army, the staff that was the weapon by which God decimated Egypt; and now Moses is wielding it again.  The crowd goes silent.  What’s Moses going to do?  Make water out of nothing or wield the staff against the people for their murmuring?  Is God for us or against us?  What’s Moses going to do?  What a pregnant moment!!

Moses leads the elders to a big, prominent rock there in Horeb.  Then, in the same way that he struck the Nile and turned it to blood and showed that is was the God if Israel who really controlled the Nile waters that gave Egypt its life, Moses struck that granite rock with a wooden staff and the rock cracked and water gushed forth – from a granite rock.  Talk about making life out of nothing.  God made water from a granite rock in the driest place of Sinai in order to save his people from death by thirst. When death was certain, God made the means for his people to live.  God has power over water.  Remember the waters of Chaos sermon a couple of weeks ago.  At the Red Sea God drowned the army of Pharaoh in the waters.  In Rephidim, the polar opposite of the Red Sea, God made water for his people so that they could live.

People, this is our God, the God who raised Jesus from the dead, who will raise us from the dead.  When we walk through troubling, dangerous times, when we walk through the Valley of the shadow of death, God is with us; His rod and staff, they comfort us.  I think in these days when trouble seems to abound.  COVID has everything out of kilter and is threatening a second wave.  The flu season is coming.  Winter and lots of snow are coming.  Nothing seems safe.  There’s so much craziness.  You know, if I get a runny nose or a sore throat do I have to get tested and isolate for two weeks.  If you turn on the news, it seems they just want to convince us that a civil war is imminent in the US.  Everywhere people are murmuring, there’s this background noise of anger against leadership, but really its anger against God.  We thirst – we long – we crave – for life just to be normal again.  But, let’s not forget who our God is – water from a rock, life out of death.  Maybe we should just cool our jets and wait and see what God is going to do because he truly is in our midst.

Maybe, it would be good for us to surround us with a few symbols that remind us of God’s faithfulness.  I’ve got things that remind me of God’s faithfulness to me over the years.  This is the Bible that my father gave me when I was sixteen, a few weeks after we had a discussion about the possibility of me going into the ministry and look where I am today.  This is the Bible that my best friend gave me at graduation from seminary.  The mother of my childhood best friend gave this little gold chain of a bookmark to me.  It used to have an amulet of a pair of hands clasped in prayer, but it fell off long ago.  I went to visit her one-day after I graduated from university and she gave it to me to let me know she would always be praying.  These Bibles are never far from me and they remind me of how God has been with me over the years and how he made that obvious by the love of a good many people.  I would encourage you in these difficult times to find some symbols of God’s faithfulness to you and keep them in your sight to remind you of who God is and that he is with you.  Amen.

 

The Lesson of the Wilderness

Exodus 17:1-7

            I have often wondered why the LORD took the Israelites wandering forty years through the wilderness of Sinai after delivering them from slavery in Egypt.  If I were God I would have turned north and headed up by the Mediterranean Sea and taken the King’s Highway.  The trip would have lasted only a couple of months and there would have been plenty of food and water.  But hey, God is God.  He is who he is and he does what he does.  But God is not arbitrary.  He had a reason for taking them into the wilderness – to teach them faith by providing for them in the most extreme of circumstances.

            So, God took the Israelites through the wilderness to teach them faith.  This is a hard one I think for us to grasp.  You see, we are not accustomed to saying that God brings hard times upon us, that God causes or lets suffering happen to us so that we can come to know him better and grow in faith.  We find it very difficult to say that God brings suffering to his people, his daughters and sons, that they might come closer to him.  We like to say that bad things happen because this is a messed up world or because we brought them upon ourselves and that God will somehow work things out because he loves us.  Rarely, if ever will anyone say, “The LORD has brought me out into the wilderness.  The LORD is doing this to me.” 

But, you know, if we are going to be truly biblical about things; if we are disciples of Jesus born from above in him by the free gift of the Holy Spirit so that we are God’s children with him; if we are such, we are going to spend some time in the wilderness and it’s going to happen because God is going to take us there.  He will indeed lead us into the wilderness, into the valley of the shadow of death where our souls are ripped to pieces rather than take us where he makes us to lie down in green pastures beside the still waters so that our souls are restored.  He will lead us to painful places where we are forced to ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?”  In a world so utterly broken and corrupted by sin, the LORD must bring us to places where in the depths of despair, of grief, of poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of boredom where our only resort is to turn to the LORD and ask, “Are you here?” 

In the wilderness we float.  We wander.  We wait.  We cannot help but ask “how am I going to survive out here?”   By nature we, like the Israelites, will complain.  We will want to turn back to the way life was before instead of moving forward.  We will doubt the LORD’s motive of love.  We will take matters into our own hands and serve and worship things that we believe will make us feel better.  We will try to bargain with the LORD.  We will say “Lord, get me out of the wilderness and I’ll do my best to be a better person and come to church more.”  But, God’s got bigger plans for us than just wanting to get us to behave a little better or come to church more often.  The grace behind the wilderness is that it is not punishment.  It is the only healing way for us to move forward in Christ Jesus and the new life he has for us.

To endure the wilderness we must keep asking the questions “Who are you Lord and why have you brought me here?”  This entails that we must keep coming before the LORD in prayer.  We don’t come asking for what I perceive I need for things to be better.  You see, the LORD brings us into the wilderness to strip us down and show us who we really are.  So it is important while we are in the wilderness to pay attention to what we are feeling for chances are we have felt these painful feelings before and buried them but now the LORD is bringing them forth from the tomb to heal us. 

There are things we can do in the wilderness to aid in our growth in Christ. We should feel free to rant at the LORD.  We are taught not to complain to the Lord.  But, God’s a big boy.  He can handle it.  Rant, for sooner or later God very cleverly turns our rants back on us and reveals to us the truth about ourselves. 

Once I was in a wilderness and I got on a rant with God.  I was complaining that I always seemed to be the one to make painful sacrifices so that other people can be happy.  He turned that one around on me one day when he told me, “That’s exactly what I do for you.”  I shut up about that and realized it’s part of what love is.

When you’re in the wilderness read the Bible listening for something to stick out to you and then spend the day or days pondering it.  Keep a journal of those things so that you can see the patterns that arise in what you hear so you can discern what is actually from the LORD and what are the things you want to hear. 

The wilderness is also a good place to draw together with our brothers and sisters in Christ to worship, to share, to pray and to study.  For it is by the love of our brothers and sisters that we are built up in Christ and equipped and nourished in Christ.  The thing to note about the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites was that they all went through it together.  There were no Lone Ranger sufferers.  This is the single most significant strength of the small congregation.  If one of us suffers we all feel it.  This fellowship and support is what the church is all about.
The fellowship in the LORD is something I really appreciate about this church.  Many churches have lost their Christian fellowship amidst a culture that is consumeristic.  People visit churches asking what programs a church has that can meet what they think they or their family’s religious needs are, religious rather than actual faith needs.  Then, if the programs aren’t there, they go elsewhere.  Fortunately, we don’t have the resources here to meet every perceived need that comes through the door.  What we do have is a home to offer those who come here asking who is the LORD and why has he brought me to the place that am at in life.  Well, the LORD is the mystery of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  He dwells here richly and he calls people here to meet him.  The people who come to this church searching for this or that program will not stay.  But those who come looking for the Lord, will find him and be well fed and stay for the Lord is among us.  Amen.

Is the LORD among Us or Not?

Exodus 17:1-7

“Is the Lord among us or not?”  That would seem to be a ridiculous question for the Israelites to have asked Moses.  They had seen the Lord smite the land of Egypt with ten plagues.  They saw the LORD part the waters of the Red Sea for them to cross and then drown the armies of Pharaoh in it.  At a place called Marah, which means Bitter, the LORD turned bitter waters to sweet for them to drink.  In the Wilderness of Sin the LORD provided them with quails and manna to eat.  Why would they doubt that the LORD was with them?

But here they were going deeper into the wilderness and god’s can be fickle, you know.  They were about two and a half months into this wandering stuff, a little bit south of just smack dab right in the middle of the Sinai Peninsula, and there they were at Rephidim.  It’s on a dry river bed, the Wadi Feiran, no water, just cliffs of granite.  Looks like this:
Amalekite_Canyon.jpg

It rains maybe once a year there.  When it does, there’s a fierce flood.  You get out of the way.  Had the LORD brought his people all the way out to the middle of nowhere to die of thirst?  We like to fault the ancient Israelites for their complaining while they were wandering in the wilderness, but when you’re thirsty and looking at nothing but granite cliffs “is the LORD among us or not” is a relevant question.

The people who live in that area today, Bedouin’s, are descendants of people who have lived there for thousands of years.  They know the desert well.  Unlike the Ancient Egyptians who had many gods, these people have for generations believed in only one God, the God of life and death.  They know that God has many miraculous means of providing food and water out in the desert.  This is the God who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush which was only about sixty miles from where they were, the God who said he was the God of the Israelite forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  This God sent Moses to lead the people out of slavery in Egypt.  But, this Rephidim was just a little too life and death for the Israelites, even more so than slavery in Egypt.

The ancient Israelites didn’t know how to survive in this land.  This was life and death for them.  So, they make their case known to Moses.  Moses, thinking he might get stoned, cries out to the LORD, and we know the rest of the story.  Moses, takes the elders, sees the LORD, parts a rock with the same staff that parted the Red Sea, and water comes forth for the people to drink.  There’s a rock in that vicinity that to this day looks like this. 
Rrphidim_1-787x587.jpg

It’s likely not the actual rock, but it is certainly a reminder of it.

I am inclined to say that on a whole the North American church doesn’t know how to survive in the wilderness it’s in today.  Denominations are shrinking.  Individual congregations are dwindling.  No matter what we try it seems nobody comes to church anymore.  Full-time single point ministers are becoming a thing of the past.  It would be nice to say like we used to say that we are just two funerals away from being able to make necessary changes.  Now so many churches are just two funerals away from having to shut the doors.  “Is the LORD among us or not” is a question that’s not too far from our lips, but we know better than to ask it.  Don’t we?  Regardless, it seems we are thirsty and looking at nothing but granite and, to be frank, where is the LORD in all this? 

Our Rephidim today is smaller churches surviving in this wilderness.  I believe that small churches matter.  I believe it so much that fifteen years ago when I finished at my church in West Virginia I made the career decision to get into small church revitalization rather than to move to a larger pulpit than what I was in.  I don’t have time to give all the reasons other than to say the small church, smaller than fifty people active, looks and acts more like the New Testament church than does the larger program church and certainly more so than the recent phenomenon of the megachurch.

As the church began as small Christian fellowships, I believe that the future of the North American church will arise from healthy small Christian fellowships.  By healthy I mean that they authentically love and thereby actually look and act like Jesus.  They devote themselves to prayer, Bible Study, and eat together often.  They make disciples with the intention of starting new small Christian fellowships rather than simply trying to get more bums in their own pews for the sake of their own survival.  This means equipping small churches to start new small churches rather than augmenting their own.

This is risky.  For, like ancient Israel in the Sinai Wilderness, we don’t know how to survive in the barren land of a de-Christianized and often anti-Christian atmosphere pervading our culture.  We are familiar with how to be the family church that has a program or two in a culture that is more than majoratively Christian.  Today, the two largest categories of church involvement are the ‘None’s” – those who’ve had no and want no involvement in the church – and the “Done’s” – those who are done with church and are not coming back.  Asking small churches to start new small churches in these times, well, that’s about as thirsty and looking at granite graveyard stones as you get in North America, but my gut says that’s where the water in the rock is at.

You know, I don’t get to come to Cornerstone too often, but I really enjoy coming here and not only because Bernice is here and I don’t say that to butter up to the Gowan legacy here.  I say it because Jesus is here and it is evident.  There is Living Water flowing from the Rock here.  You are living proof that small churches can go through a wilderness and do more than just survive.  Lay leadership is strong here.  Your elders and Jim do a fantastic job of pastoral care.  The Word is being soundly taught and proclaimed here.  There are those in your midst who would be absolutely lost without the love of this, their church family.  Jesus ministers through each of you.  Everything I said about healthy small churches pertains here.  The answer to the question “Is the LORD among us or not” is an obvious “Yes!”  I would challenge you folks with a different question: What would you have to do different to gear up to start another fellowship like this one?  Amen.